Media, Culture, Technology

Month: March 2015

Painting

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Everyone’s “everyday” consists of a different makeup, a different routine. Places, on the other hand, remain constant. I explore these everyday places in order to ground viewers in an area with which they are familiar, to give them a sense of reality. My images, however, try to capture the surreal in these places of reality. I want to show the parts that are ignored, the areas that seem to be so commonplace that one wouldn’t think anything odd could possibly exist there. When I take photos, I look to deconstruct an everyday area to show its quirks, oddities, and most importantly, the aspects that make it surreal.

Digital photography is my medium. For this project, I limited myself to a single parking garage and explored it as well as the surrounding area. Every photo is taken of, or from, this garage at night. I used a tripod to keep the images clear and crisp to capture the location’s inherent surrealism, letting darker areas become illuminated and bright ones become blown out or flared up.

I want to disorient the observer by giving these photos the constructed quality of a collage. Parts of these photos should not feel like they go together. In creating this aesthetic effect, light plays a major role. Most of the light is artificial with the only natural light coming from the moon.

My biggest influence for this photo series was David Lynch. His films and artwork focuses on aesthetics, texture, and the surreal. While I do not concern myself with texture, I am very interested in the manner in which Lynch produces a sense of the odd in the most mundane locations. Inspired by Lynch, my series attempts to force the viewer to look at the everyday in a new way, with a particular emphasis on color and composition.

There’s No Place Like Home

Wow. Gone Home shattered all my assumptions about video games. But before I get into that let me offer two disclaimers. One, this is, in fact, the first video game I have every played from start to finish (unless you count a round of Super Mario Kart) and the first video game I have ever owned. Second, I will be talking about my personal life in connection to this game. If that makes your skin itch, I’m sorry.

In the hyper-masculine realm of popular video games, violence is king. Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, Diablo, etc. Games are marketed to men and use female characters as pawns to drive the story and to develop the male protagonist’s character. Women in games are not independent or their own characters, but are rather devices marketed to men. This often means that the female character is killed just to give the male character depth or purpose. In addition there is the completely unacceptable sexual violence in Grand Theft Auto where players are REWARDED for raping women, blatantly encouraging rape culture. As someone who has witnessed this problem and who had a mother who purposely kept video games out of the house for this reason, I didn’t realize that there were games out there that were interested in women and their lives. To my surprise, after five minutes of playing Gone Home (developed and published by The Fulbright Company). I was completely hooked on this emotionally complex and intellectually challenging game. It requires players to contemplate women’s lives (their whole lives–not only their connection to men, or their male or masculine personas, but women as they live and struggle in a patriarchal society).

From the start you are playing a young woman: Katie. And you are most interested in the life of your younger sister, Sam. You return home from a semester abroad to your family’s new house (they moved while you were away), and find the house strangely empty. The ‘game’ aspect involves your solving the mystery of where your family is. You walk through your house and learn about your life and the lives of your family members. Understanding the characters and their lives is crucial. There is no enemy. There is no specific goal or quest. Character development drives the game forward. To my amazement, this development is largely focused on Sam’s non-traditional views of gender and her budding relationship with Lonnie, an older girl in her class. As the game is set in 1995, they exchange mix tapes of early female punk rock and write a zine about knocking out the patriarchy. From Sam’s experiences of oppression and prejudice to the fact that THERE ARE TAMPONS IN THE BATHROOM, the game strives to provide a holistic view of a family and specifically a daughter in transition and turmoil.

Even better than that, this game made me feel. I moved from Massachusetts to Virginia after my freshman year in high school. I was suddenly the only openly queer student in a small private christian school. I had two older sisters. I was intensely angry with my parents. Walking through Gone Home felt like walking back into that time in my life. I read notes from Sam to her parents because they weren’t speaking. I heard Sam talk about being bullied in school. I relived how hard it is to be different in a new place with a family you don’t feel connected to. My family was much less religious than Sam’s but I still felt like outsider. This video game made me reflect on that time and forced me to look at it from a different angle. This self-examination was not what I expected to face in any video game. I hadn’t expected that a video game could make me cry with happiness at its conclusion.

The depth given to these characters in the game is astounding. Here is new a way to explore the experiences of a queer identity, to feel how horrible it is to be invisible. The game not only gives historically accurate references to the lesbian community and culture at the time but also has definite connections to present-day queer experiences. The journal entry “A Very Long Phase” talks about the experience of coming out and the powerful impact of each person’s reaction. Sam’s parents simply deny that she is a lesbian (though her identity is never specified, I use lesbian for simplicity) and believe that it is a phase. Unfortunately, this is not unusual even today. Women, especially those who are queer identified, face the challenge of people believing (1) they just don’t know what they’re doing, (2) they’re doing it for male attention, or (3) eventually they’ll get married and everything will be normal (Please, just don’t let women bond with women! If men aren’t involved, IT CAN’T BE REAL). This intersection of sexism and homophobia adds to the struggle of women to be treated with respect, as someone with agency and knowledge.

So I know that this review was more of a love fest than a proper review, but that’s how I feel about Gone Home. This emotional and complex game goes beyond entertainment. It is not a time waste, or useless. Gone Home, if you’re willing, will entertain you and make think about who you are. If you have the time, I absolutely recommend that you play this game. Before I played it I never thought I’d really enjoy video games, or that they were more than a diversion. But after? I think I’m going to search for other games like this. I want more.

Frank Miller’s Martha Washington

Writer and artist Frank Miller is a sort of paradoxical figure among comic book readers. On the one hand, he wrote The Dark Knight Returns and Batman Year One. I mean, he basically invented the modern Batman. Those titles, along with his Daredevil run, helped usher in comic books “adult” enough for us to read in classes. But it’s also pretty widely understood that Miller is kind of, vaguely, a fascist. And sort of a racist. And I guess if we’re going to get into it, he’s not particularly fond of gay or disabled people either. It also seems really hard for him to write a female character who isn’t a sex worker and he certainly doesn’t like Muslims. These exaggerated, though not entirely unfounded, accusations make for awkward conversations about the roots of modern comics. Though Miller’s written some of the greats, he’s also written a few of the worst. Miller is thus one of the last people we would expect to write a strong, believable woman of color as a main character or deal with real social issues without being preachy or disrespectful. And this is weird, because he wrote Martha Washington.

Martha Washington first appeared in Give me Liberty, a 1990 4-issue miniseries published by Dark Horse, written by Frank Miller and drawn by Watchmen’s Dave Gibbons. Give me Liberty begins in the not-so-distant future of 1995 with the birth of Martha Washington. The following year Martha’s father is killed in a protest against the economic policies of President Rexell, a thinly veiled caricature of Ronald Reagan. The story follows Martha surviving in the government created slums until her eventual enlistment in the military.

Although the comic focuses on Martha, it is situated in a developing story about the political climate in America. Rexell is replaced with an idealistic liberal president when the white house is blown up by Saudi Arabian terrorists (I mentioned Miller’s feelings on Muslims, right?). The new president decides to deploy forces to save the rain forests (which I guess is what environmentalists cared about before climate change). This is when the story starts getting really weird. The rain forests are being threatened by Fat Boy Burger, a multinational fast food restaurant that wants to cut down the forests so that they can grow cattle on the newly cleared land. The Fat Boy Burger corporation fights with giant piloted robots that look like fat boys holding burgers. They also fight with horrifying chemical weapons.

Something Give me Liberty does particularly well is pairing the surreal with the serious. There’s a beautiful splash page of Martha breaking down into tears and then brushing them aside and gritting her teeth after all of her fellow soldiers are killed with poisonous gas. It’s a pretty grim scene. Later she takes down one of the giant burger robots with a helicopter. The comic jumps back and forth between silly and scary without making either seem forced. There’s an earlier section where Martha is institutionalized at a mental hospital that is secretly doing experiments on children to turn them into psychic supercomputers. Then everyone in the hospital is sent out onto the streets because government funding for the hospital is cut. We have a very real issue, poor funding for mental health facilities, paired with the very fantastic idea of psychic supercomputers. Despite all the talk of Miller’s gritty realism, I think he excels when pursuing this sort of juxtaposition. He brings real issues into a world that is still distinctly a comic book universe. In this way, he touches on important aspects of our culture; but unlike many of the other authors coming up around the same time (I’m looking at you Moore), he doesn’t sacrifice the thing that make silver age comics great: absurdity.

I’ve mentioned that Martha Washington is a strong character and I stand by that. However, before I can recommend this comic, which I strongly do, I should mention that it’s not a perfectly progressive comic. There are a few more gay Nazi’s than I’m comfortable with. Miller is able to get away with so much partly because he makes fun of virtually everyone. Conservative or liberal, Miller guns for them and the only one who really comes out looking good is Martha. The story is beautifully drawn, fun without being stupid, relevant without being preachy; it exemplifies the nuance that characterizes Miller’s early works.

Earnestness: Glatzer & Westmoreland’s Still Alice

Pauline Kael wrote, after seeing Shoeshine (1946): “I came out of the theater, tears streaming, and overheard the petulant voice of a college girl complaining to her boyfriend, ‘Well I don’t see what was so special about that movie.’ I walked up the street, crying blindly, no longer certain whether my tears were for the tragedy on the screen, the hopelessness I felt for myself, or the alienation I felt from those who could not experience the radiance of Shoeshine. For if people cannot feel Shoeshine, what can they feel?”

A similar experience for me happened when watching Still Alice; a heartwrenching existential play written and directed by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland. Continue reading

Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, The Wrath of God

“After the Spaniards had conquered and sacked the Inca realm, the sorely oppressed Indians invented the legend of a golden kingdom El Dorado. Its alleged location was in the impenetrable bogs of the Amazon tributaries. Near the end of the year 1560, a large expedition of Spanish adventurers under the leadership of Gonzalo Pizarro set off from the Peruvian sierras. The only document to survive from this lost expedition is the diary of the monk Gaspar de Carvajal.”

This is the text preceding Werner Herzog’s 1972 film Aguirre, The Wrath of God and, though Herzog claims historians repeatedly ask him where he found these documents, it doesn’t claim to be anything more than a fabrication–which it is. How could it be anything else? Certainly Don Lope de Aguirre, Gonzalo Pizzaro, and Gaspar de Carvajal were real people, but the story itself, its cinematic presentation, chronicles a megalomaniacal odyssey through the gates of hell. The Spanish conquistadors, spurred onward by their hubris and insatiable desire, rush through the dense Amazonian tributaries toward El Dorado as quickly as the current will carry them. There’s no need to be coy, Aguirre is one of the best films ever made, and its most impressive quality might be the way it perfectly balances fantasy and reality, resulting in a film that feels both grounded yet dreamlike and larger than life.

The actual origin of this story was a small coincidence. “I spent some time at a friend’s house,” Herzog recollects. “And he was on the phone all the time when I arrived and he had a huge library and I went through his books and I grabbed one book by coincidence about adventures and discoveries and opened it and there was half a page on a man called Don Lope de Aguirre.” Herzog then rushed home and wrote the screenplay in roughly two and half days, finishing the story as he traveled to Vienna with his soccer team. One might expect Herzog’s first draft to reflect the finished film’s meticulous visual complexities, carefully planned out in advance–but that’s the beautiful irony residing in Herzog’s vision. Herzog’s screenplay was nothing more than prose, lacking a script of any type, designed to specifically avoid the type of dramatic and visual contrivance that characterizes most films of this scope. In order to make the film he wanted, Herzog needed to lead his cast and crew deep into the jungle and try to find a movie in there through improvisation, allowing his cast to take a journey identical to that of their characters. “The story takes place in the Peruvian jungle,” he would later say, “you have to go there, there’s no alternative.” He needed to embody the deranged character that captured his imagination, leading his crew into the jungle without any assurances of what he might find. He needed to become Don Lope de Aguirre, in pursuit of an El Dorado all his own.

Principle photography for Aguirre, shot on location nearby Machu Picchu, was as chaotic and dangerous a production as any in film history. In fact, Herzog and his crew would never even have reached the difficult shoot had they not been bumped off their original flight to Brazil, a plane that ended up crashing in the jungle and killing 94 people. This would be only their first brush with death.

Of course, merely the fact of shooting on location in the jungle was dangerous enough, especially given how limited their resources were. Herzog needed to make a massive period-adventure film with an absurdly small budget of around $360,000. “Sometimes,” begins Herzog as he recalls their financial difficulties, “I had to sell my boots or my wrist watch just to get breakfast.” Financial shortcomings like this were common during the five week shoot (Herzog didn’t even own the 35 mm camera used to shoot the film–he stole it), all five of them made yet more difficult by the dense terrain, which was filled with disease-carrying insects. There was also the occasional run-in with the local wildlife, as Herzog specifically mentions in a reflection on the film: “I grabbed a tree and it was full of fire ants, and chopped it with my machete but it didn’t chop the whole tree, it was too thick. And hundreds of fire ants rained down on me, and I got bitten about 150 times and developed a very bad fever. So it was the daily sort-of stuff you got through, that’s okay.”

The most horrifying creature in the jungle, however, was Klaus Kinski, the man playing Herzog’s titular lead. Herzog’s struggle to control Kinski has become something of a legend in cinematic history (Herzog claims they hated each other so much during the shoot, that they both independently plotted the other’s murder). Christian Bale’s rant on the set of Terminator Salvation (2009)–setting today’s standard for prima donna behavior on set–doesn’t even come close to the tumultuous presence of Klaus Kinski. He was literally dangerous. “One night, the extras were a little bit noisy,” said Herzog, in regards to one of Kinski’s more violent outbursts, “they drank a little bit and played cards, and Kinski couldn’t take it. So he screamed and yelled, grabbed his Winchester rifle, I mean a real Winchester, and fired three bullets through the walls of their hut, and there were 45 of them crammed together. That he didn’t kill anyone of them is a miracle.” Kinski did, however, blow off one of their fingers. Herzog confiscated Kinski’s rifle and, later on during the shoot, after Kinski threatened to walk out on the film (which was a very real threat since Kinski had already established a reputation for violating his contracts without a second thought), Herzog himself threatened to shoot Kinski if he bailed. Kinski stayed.

Much like the characters in the film, the cast and crew of Aguirre faced many perils during their expedition to “find” a movie in the rainforest. So what did Herzog’s camera find in the jungle? Was it worth it? Herzog has always maintained that the struggles in making Aguirre were insignificant in comparison to the final product, but I find this stance slightly problematic. Aguirre, as a film, was certainly worth enduring an incredibly difficult production–it’s one of the best films ever made, and I would allow myself to be eaten alive by fire ants in joyous zeal if it meant I got to make a film like this. My problem is that Herzog’s struggles in making Aguirre aren’t insignificant in comparison to final film, they are crucial, they are required: They are the final film.

This concept, the philosophy dictating Herzog’s decisions as director, has often been linked to an anecdote relayed by famed film critic André Bazin in “Cinema and Exploration” (1967), where he attempts to describe a specific type of cinematic realism. Michel Ichat’s Victoire sur l’Annapurna (1953), a documentary chronicling a team of French mountain climbers as they ascended to the 8,091 meter peak of Annapurna I, is incomplete, says Bazin, because an avalanche “snatched the camera out of the hands of [Maurice] Herzog” (162). Bazin’s description is visual and establishes the image of a camera buried in snow, unable to accomplish photographic registration as its lens is obscured. In this moment, the distance between the camera and its object is compressed until it vanishes entirely: the real has entered into the film frame. The existential force of the avalanche is reinforced by its unrepresentability, and Maurice Herzog’s experience encompasses the sublime. It’s in this brush with death, with the uncontained power of the natural world, where Bazin’s understanding of the indexical image and the origin of Werner Herzog’s filmmaking philosophy reside.

Scholars have long suspected that Bazin’s story is what inspired Werner Stipetić to change his name to Werner Herzog, but whether or not this is true, this anecdote captures the soul of Herzog’s filmmaking aesthetic. For Herzog, conquering a mountain is synonymous with filming it, and the world yields meaningful images because it’s deadly, because it’s powerful and uncontrollable, often beyond our understanding. Herzog is after a certain type of authenticity that can only be produced by these encounters at the edges of the world, where death beats its wings loudly and can be dodged only through demanding physical investment. That is the magic of Aguirre: there is no magic, there are no tricks. The images, and the experiences they capture, are real. Film and reality become permeable, and in Aguirre it is a two way street between them.

In a scene quite reminiscent of the one Bazin describes, Herzog loads his actors onto several rafts and joins them onboard, filming as they travel downriver and traverse rapids. As the murky water begins to foam, picking up speed, and the actors cling dearly to the raft’s center for life (except, of course, Kinski, who instead approaches the edge), Herzog instructs cinematographer Thomas Mauch to bring the camera closer to the water and let it splash up onto the lens, allowing the furious river to invade the frame just like the avalanche from Bazin’s story. The camera almost seems to merge with the scene it’s trying to capture, and this particular use of the water droplet motif reappears all throughout Herzog’s career, from Fitzcarraldo (1982), to his hilarious collaboration with Zak Penn, Incident at Loch Ness (2004), and even Rescue Dawn (2006).

The sublime, intangible power of nature in this imagery invokes a quote from Herzog’s Minnesota Declaration of 1999: “there is such a thing as a poetic, ecstatic truth.” When the real world enters the film frame it corrodes the relation between film and reality, the gap between sign and referent disintegrates and we’re left with images that are, ultimately, as intangible and incomprehensible as nature itself. Herzog’s films are lyrical, brewing with poetic moments that are, at their core, inexplicable and beyond signification. At the same time, the pure physicality of Herzog’s filmmaking process imbues his work with a distinct corporeality that seems to be soaked up into the image and provide these poetic inserts with the gravitas of “truth” or “authenticity.”

In Aguirre, this type of authenticity is everywhere and it works perfectly. It feels like Herzog and his crew were actually there in 1561 with a camera. During the credit sequence, the entire cast is shown descending a precarious stone path etched into the side of a mountain. When the characters burn down an Amazonian village, Herzog actually burned down an abandoned village. And when Herzog wanted a strikingly poetic set-piece for the last act of the film, he actually built a full-sized caravel, constructed as a shipwreck, which he impaled atop a tree. It’s not solely the facts that the film is shot on location and that the actors are getting down and dirty in the muck that imbues the images with a corporeal aura, but also the physical investment of the director, who marches through the jungle, sells his possessions, contracts diseases, battles fire ants, and makes this ascent himself. The extraordinary degree of effort required to perform this feat of filmmaking is what gives it such poetic power.

And incredibly, despite the sublime aggression of the Amazonian nature, Kinski’s performance dominates the film. He embodies the megalomaniacal spirit of Don Lope de Aguirre perfectly. The physicality of Kinski’s performance perfectly compliments the corporeal presence of nature. Both the way he stalks around like a crab or spider and the latent fury of his countenance are unforgettable. For a time, Herzog had intended Aguirre to have a hunchback, but he dropped the idea in favor of employing an outfit that incorporates an abundance of straps along the back, as if to suggest that Aguirre needed to be physically held together (this touch makes Aguirre feel remarkably Shakespearean; he’s particularly reminiscent of Richard III). In the face of all of nature’s power, Aguirre is a man of insane, insatiable ambition–and this ambition has devoured the other aspects of his personality, the disposition of his mind epitomized by the film’s final moments. I always feel that it is Aguirre, rather than the endless river he’s riding, that represents the wrath of god.

Werner Herzog’s filmography is eclectic and filled with numerous films I’d dub masterpieces, but Aguirre, The Wrath of God is maybe his best work. It is one of but a handful of films–a group including films like Citizen Kane (1941), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Apocalypse Now (1979), There Will Be Blood (2007), Andrei Rublev (1966), The Night of the Hunter (1955), Taxi Driver (1976), Marketa Lazarova (1967), The Vanishing (1988), and Persona (1966)–that strikes me as being, somehow, better than perfect. The filmmakers seem to be exploring territory they might not fully understand, but they are overwhelmed by the desire to tell this story nonetheless. The film thus takes on a life and personality of its own.

I can explain what happens in Aguirre, but I cannot necessarily say what the film is about. There’s no way to pin this film down. The film has absorbed the sublime, intangible nature of the world it inhabits, of the river and avalanche. Aguirre is like a vision in a dream, and it does not provide us with answers, but  questions. Who are we right now? Where do we come from? What is our place in this world? How do we behave in the face of danger? We will never find definitive answers, but I believe viewers will find Aguirre insightful forever.

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